SCANDALS AND MUSSOLINI’S TOTALTARIO

BESIDES both major political parties being privy to legislating big government on the masses, differences of policy, and differences of tactics used to persuade voters of the prudence of those policies, exists.

For many years, Democrats have wisely seen scandals as multifarious— glimpsed, as it were, not simply events to be used to discredit and topple G.O.P leadership, but more importantly as means to enlarge the scope and power of government — allowing for the marriage between the people’s interest and the aims and ambitions of the state. Called statism, or progressivism, this has been and continues to be, the 100-year design of the progressive mind.

Conversely, Republicans have used Democrat scandals — most recently in 1998-1999 with the Clinton-Lewinsky ruckus — as a means to prove the moral degernacy of the culture of secularism, hotly imbibed by progressive leftists hell-bent on legislating “alternative life styles” on the masses.

In a word, fear, rather than ideological classical liberalism drove Republican response.

Such political “fear” allowed Republicans to empower their own flock. Adding to the upper reaches of the G.O.P ruling class, Republicans opened up Pandora’s box to moral hypocrisy when G.O.P members themselves, mere mortals of course, and in the Christian parlance “sinners,” found themselves unable to meet the puritanical, “evangelical” standards of their own rhetoric.

Further down the road, because of an absence of classical liberal principals, Republicans enlarged the scope and authority of government — a move which when the G.O.P came to lose elections, enabled no bulwark against Pres. Obama’s radical progressive intentions.

In essence, Republicans helped create the web Obama entraps and impedes American individualism — of people and communities being sovereign, having different and more authority than the state.

Now government is ever stronger, enabled by Republican policies no less. In the intervening years, scant ideological bridges were constructed by conservatives or Republicans between the concept of government, as articulated by the Founders, and those whose rhetorical flourishes boasted of being the ideological seed of the Founder’s 18th century liberalism.

In contemporary times, the Obama scandals offer an opportune time for Republicans to change course. The scandals of the Obama administration by collusion or by jaundiced mismanagement result from progressive totalitarianism. Americans, who voted in majority for the current charade, face a battle of ideology and its attendant consequences, not simply incompetence.

Since Republicans and congressional conservatives do not contain the guts to oust Pres. Obama from the White House by means of Articles of Impeachment, it would do well for conservative Republicans to plant ideological seeds. The I.R.S. scandal, the wiretapping scandal, all pertain to the idea “the government is us” — the Mussolini and progressive idea about people’s interests and those of the state being one.

This rides hard and fast against the founder’s recognition; the classical liberal idea of sovereign individuals with inalienable rights in hand, who conceive of sundry and more authoritarian assumptions of what their own interests consist of — always. Human nature. We the people are not government. Our interests are not only different, but of radically different scope. Government is one function human beings contract to do in order to preserve and animate the inalienable rights the U.S. Constitution reveals to be apart of our status as human beings.

In a word, the I.R.S. scandal illustrates many in our civitas — people of constitutional and “conservative” convictions — find their conceptions of self-interest at odds with the state. In reaction, the government of which Pres. Barack Obama is Chief Executive, deemed it necessary to impede and intimidate citizens with such lofty ideals by coercion and threat — a muscular response to free assembly, one might add, and expressive of the petty tyrant and not of the liberalism of American rule of law or constitutional traditions.

Still, the jetty of “conservative politics” is breached by progressive waves easily far and wide, ever present, when those calling themselves conservatives remain fixated with intolerance and an inability to see the two-sided edge of classical liberalism’s consequential arid borders. Conservatives remain stuck in the stewed bog because of liberties other Americans demand — individuals with differing conceptions of self-interest and authority in areas of morality. Such issues remain the primary way progressives are able to attenuate liberty across the constitutional edifice, yet be routinely elected and seen by the voting populace as the party of liberty of the individual. But progressivism is only freeing if one’s own conceptions of a myriad of life’s attendant convictions coincide with the state. If not, progressivism is tyrannical — either soft or hard — and assumes an unresponsive dynamic to reform by the people and for the people.

The Obama White House finds itself embattled. And classical liberals who govern within the Republican Party ought to see the battle, unlike Romney’s idea of the 2012 presidential election, as a siege of ideas and their consequences — between an ideology which can preserve civil society and individual interests, and an ideology which because human being are who they are, will always be at war with the people — as individuals and as communities.